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| The beer glasses don't move |
The weedy man-bunned Hungarian podcaster Károly Póka with the immobile Guiness-glass affectation sat down with Kyle Allen from the @BrothersOfTheSerpent Youtube channel (that he runs with his brother Russell, exploring ancient mysteries, megalithic sites, and the deep history of our civilization). In the episode "Göbekli Tepe: Older Than We’re Told? (Kyle Allen – Ancient Technology Podcast)", Allen pontificates for hours over "what the T-shaped pillars actually tell us, how reliable the current dating of the site really is, who the people behind these megaliths might have been, and why Göbekli Tepe continues to challenge the mainstream timeline of human history". The latter is a red flag, as in the specialist literature in several languages for 26 years Gobekli Tepe and the other Tas Tepeler sites have been writing the mainstream vies of the Natufian/Pre-potter Neolithic A transition and all that relates to that.
In the discussion of Göbekli Tepe, Allen presents a loosely assembled case for pushing the site’s origins further back in time than the dates established by archaeologists, but his argument ultimately rests less on evidence than on a generalized distrust of the field itself. Although the site has been excavated and studied intensively for over two decades following its identification by Klaus Schmidt, and dated to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period, roughly the tenth millennium BCE, Allen suggests that the monumental T-shaped pillars may be older than the materials used to date them. He arrives at this conclusion despite openly acknowledging that he has not properly engaged with the archaeological literature and, at points, struggling to articulate basic concepts drawn from the small portion he has encountered.
His reasoning begins with the observation that the stratigraphy of the site appears complex and, in places, disturbed. From this he infers that the layering cannot be trusted, proposing that natural processes such as slope collapse or seismic activity repeatedly buried and re-exposed the structures, thereby scrambling the sequence of deposits. He extends this line of thought by referring to studies of earthquake damage, noting that some pillars fractured while partially buried, which he takes as evidence that they must predate the layers surrounding them. He also argues that the enclosing stone walls must be later additions because they obscure parts of the carved pillars and, in his view, represent an inferior structural design, leading him to conclude that the megaliths belong to an earlier, separate phase of construction. Further doubt is cast, in his account, on radiocarbon dating itself, which he treats as unreliable due to contamination, mixing of materials, or chemical alteration, suggesting that the dates obtained may reflect later activity rather than the original building phase. Finally, he points to the large accumulation of midden deposits as evidence for long-term, repeated use, including episodes of burial and re-excavation, from which he infers that the initial construction could be significantly older than currently believed.
Taken together, these claims amount to a speculative reinterpretation of the site that substitutes suspicion for method. The difficulties he highlights (disturbed stratigraphy, site formation processes, reuse of structures, and challenges in dating) are not overlooked problems but precisely the kinds of issues that archaeologists working at Göbekli Tepe have spent years documenting, analysing, and incorporating into a coherent chronological framework. The consistency of radiocarbon dates from secure contexts, the typology of stone tools, and the broader regional comparisons all converge on the same timeframe. Allen’s argument does not meaningfully engage with this body of evidence; instead, it relies on partial understanding, selective emphasis, and an underlying assumption that the specialists who have studied the site in detail are fundamentally mistaken. In that sense, his position is not an alternative interpretation grounded in new data, but a rejection of established conclusions without the methodological or evidentiary basis required to support it. Bits of it, he just invents, and persists in shieling his coneptions from question by claiming he "can't remember the details".
